Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel today, as she spent all her writerly energy drafting a short story to submit to an anthology of interest to her.
I made it! That's really the overall feeling that comes out of this year's effort--I made it. How did I manage this with a full-time job? I know I've done it, repeatedly. But this year it was harder than it's been in a while. I lost a couple of evenings doing things that were not writing, and that days that I did write were under 1,000 words for a long stretch. One day, I only wrote 93 words. But I persisted, had a couple of high-volume days, and hit 50,000 a few days before the 30th. The story is nowhere near complete--my outline is 26 chapters, plus epilogue, and I left off at the start of chapter 19. My master plan is to return to Christophina's Garden , create a new outline for what's been written and what has yet to be written, and then finish the thing! After that, I'll finish up Christophina's Moon and then work on revising all three books simultaneously to sift out the continuity errors. If I'm clever enough, I may be able to come up with
So I added back an additional scene that I'd lopped off and grafted it to the ending. I'm still not 100% sure about it. But it seems to work better than where I'd originally left off and it was nice to retrieve some of those clever lines that I'd tossed away. (Thank goodness for saved drafts.) And now I'm already pondering ways to rewrite the returned lines into something a little more plausible than what I'd put down in the flurry of NaNo. I think I'll go do that now.
Early on in this blog (I'm not going to link to it and embarrass myself) I said that self-publishing was doing the hard work from the wrong end; that the hard work didn't go into making the manuscript perfect enough for a major publisher to pick up, but instead went into notifying the world that your book existed and would anybody like to buy it, please. Please relax. I have rethought that particular perspective, so please don't expend the effort into defending independent publishing. I'm with you. The fourteen-odd novels I've crafted with the help of National Novel Writing Month somehow wove themselves into a unified world which I've taken to calling the Juneiverse, after the main character in a novel called Soft Places , which I tried to revise and submit to agents but got nowhere with. (The last time I reread it, I understood why.) I hope to retell June's story one day in a much better version, but first... The first NaNoWriMo I have successfully complet
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